Well Mom, I guess this is goodbye. When you think of me, think of me kindly. Perhaps someday, perhaps as soon as this evening when I get to Indiana, I'll post again. But if the plane crashes or something I'll still try, just to annoy everyone because ectoplasmic fingers just don't operate keyboards as well as fingers of bone and muscle. So if you see a message like "al e p Rapp j Amos is took the number I had dibs on th r w s" you'll know I've been here.

What is success? Grasping at icicles, Harvesting the drips, Eating gold.

Aren't beans more substantial?

You look at each others' store of chocolate, with envy. Who could possibly eat so much? There aren't enough days in the year to wear all those clothes even once.

Don't you have anything to love? Nothing to treasure? Nothing to hold in your hands, or your arms, Or even stroke with your fingertips? Nothing so comfortable to wear that it molds to your body from long use?

Poverty!

Come sit down here on this box. I'll give you some thoughts, and my attention. I'll stay up late and write a letter, one you can hold in your hands and feel the paper crinkle against your fingers. It's the attention that really matters.

To how many people in your life did you really pay attention? Did you really never see that golden light streaming onto the concrete through the turning leaves? How do you think you'll recognize it now? When the shell is gone, you'll be hollow inside.

So sit outside in the sun or the rain. Then at least you'll be filled with light and water. And something planted in your soil can grow.

Open a door into a quiet, changing room. Sometimes it has no roof, no walls. Sometimes it is dark and still, dusky light with a comfortable couch. Still other times it is simply a window with a raindrop trailing down, following almost but not quite the tracks of countless other drops, And the quiet of the room behind the window.

Who is there, sharing that vast, enclosing, freeing space? There is a presence, benign. Malignancy can't find the door, doesn't even know to look. But if he did, the way would be indistinguishable in his dark corridor.

But for you, the outline shines with a silver light. Step inside. Everything is waiting for you. Lining the walls are the placidly smiling Buddhas, their eyes twinkling with delight and welcome. But don't be shy. They're in their own rooms, after all. This is the in-between space where everyone and no one is.

One is waiting, ready to let you see through his eyes. You can feel it, can't you--- The acceptance, the peace, the air like breathable music? Veiled though you are, and shrouded in blind mortality, Here is the space between. Come, wander and rest, There's a door on this side, too.

We will now discuss Death, That changing of one thing into another, A reality beyond which we cannot see, Stuck as we are in the undaunted hereness of now. We work upon substance As firm as marble, as fragile as porcelain. Don't go into the next room. There is nothing inside--- No floor. Take this chisel. Make your scratches on the rock. Let the people coming in later wonder what you meant By your wild profusion of grapes. In a little while you can go stand At the door of the floorless room And toss in a shard. But don't expect to hear it clatter at the bottom. The one I threw is falling yet.

Chongo abandoned his mother to work in the sex trade, which forced her into it so that she could support his baby sister, who had to work in the sex trade when his mother became old and crippled and couldn't work any more?

Cedar is what the beams are --not teak, I misspoke-- but the lattice frames are only available in redwood. Hell, with a good sealant opil in them, the buggers will choke to death before they can start a cave.

My lifestyle, Chongo? At least I did not abandon my mother and drive my sister into the ilicit sex trade just so she could support her aging parent. You walk in shame with every step you take, sir. Go back to the trees.

Amos, yesterday (Nov. 14) my gardening guru talked about some new kind of treated lumber for outdoor use. I didn't get the name, but I've heard about a couple lately. Here is a link to the page to find his podcasts. The program is three hours on Sunday morning, I didn't hear the first hour or so, so if you want to listen to the last couple of hours you'll find it.

Last week on This Old House on the second half hour when they go out in the field with the various experts, the gardener put in a raised bed using beams that were treated with glass to make them quite durable without having the toxic chemicals that can leach into the soil. So you might want to look up that program also.

I suppose in your fevered jungle of an imagination a pessury is kind of a low-pressure ant-eater system?

Anyway, the old ones are smithereens. Pay attention. Do you have any idea how much chloroxeninic tetrafoibles get released when you coat smithereens with epoxy? Why don't you care about the environment?

Use epoxy paint on the old ones and reuse them! Reuse, recycle, repair! Do you know how much greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere with every cuss word you utter? Why, this project alone has probably slain thousands of hectares of rain forest!

Jungle killer. Meanie. Somewhere a cute, fuzzy, little baby pessury is dying because of you! PETA and The Animal Liberation Front have targeted you as a possible target for direct action. Thousands of minks will be released on your property any minute now, and pictures of a nude Divine rejecting the wearing of anything will be on the billboards across the street.

Later this week, I am SO going back to redwood lattices in relatively sturdy frames. Coated in preserving oil they will resist the buggers just fine for eight years. Oy!! The American Dream is a rough road to travel, I b'leeve.

Absolutely frustrating, is what. I got ALL the panels off, sawed into smithereens and bagged and cleaned up the yard. I touched up the trim paint and re-oiled the support teak timbers. But the vinyl lattice I bought is limp and the edging that is supposed to support it is wonky and the whole deal will make a bunch of sine waves in summer, when the polymers expand. I could add 1x4s as rigidizing supports but that would require redwood again, because there's no shaped lumber in vinyl at our home depot. I dunno. I may end up building a steel frame, just to be ornery. The physical universe is SO damn contrary-minded sometimes...

You report with well-earned pride, Stilly! Congratulations to all involved.

Be safe on your yo-yoing travels, Rapaire. I hope you have a good book and that you don't get carsick while reading in a bus. You know, you really should consider staying the night at the home of a librarian I know down in SLC. It would save a lot of there-and-backing.

It's a beautiful day here in Southern California's own Branebegone-by-the-Sea, where the handshake is alittle more laid back and all the children are far out. The sun is shining and I have been at hard labor taking down all the redwood lattices that comprised my patio suncover. The glare is killer without them. They gave me a good eight years but constant sunlight and the occasional termite finally did them in.

I just got home from attending Moonglow's play at her university. The Theater Arts Dept. put on Eugene O'Neill's one comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, set in 1906 Connecticut, near Yale (in New Haven). And to help her research I had pulled out my Ansonia, Connecticut (just west of New Haven) family photos from 1905, 1906, and 1907, of my great aunts in their high school graduation photos and another one taken of a women's team at school. And one of my grandfather with other young gentlemen from Yale. She also studied how a slip (petticoat) or possibly skirt that I have from that same household was made. Some eyelet lace, and horizontal tucks that make the skirt look fancier.

She really did her homework and design - when the curtain opens the stage is dark, then Fourth of July music of a parade comes up, and when the lights turn on there is a tableau - everyone in the play right there, in costume - it was gorgeous and it was like they stepped out of those old family photos! She did such a beautiful job! Apparently some of the male actors didn't like that they had to wear stiff removable collars, like in the photo, but she got it right down to the vest the father was wearing under his suit coat, and his watch fob! There were petticoats under the women's skirts, and there were all sorts of features that made the blouses all unique, yet they all had that turn-of-the-century feel for each character.

Point out that Bob Marley is some time dead and believed Haile Salassi to the the Messiah. Make him write a paper about Haile Salassi, who he was, what he did, etc. An extended comparison of Rastafariansism and Pastafarianism is also indicated. This is an extreme case, so move quickly.

The Bob Marley was great. I wonder if it works for older children as well. I've been having a terrible time trying to strap Ben into his car seat lately. He wants to sit in the driver's seat every time!

He does have the goal of wearing a different Bob Marley T-shirt for his school picture every year of high school. So far, so good.

You are just writhing with jealousy, sir, at the thought of my bottomless well of fecund creativity. But it does not reflectr well on your nature to let such base feelings turn you away from civility and drive you to the snarling vip'rous retorts of the small-minded man.

Mom, I called dibs on 38383, but it looks like that will happen on Monday when I'm going to be out of town or even Tuesday when I'll be flying to Chicago to visit friends and family over Thanksgiving. So I'll give the dibs to Eiseley.

MOM, Cinnamon looks terrible, but the vet says she's just showing an allergic reaction, probably to something she ate. So she's taking Benedryl for the weekend. And probably getting some good dog naps in. Make room for her on the couch, will you? She needs to be a little spoilt.

Oh yes, I remember the pre-Web days. Back when Men and Women wrote code in binary, sometime driven to inputting with an old manual typewriter and using l and o because of the Great 1 And 0 Shortage. I myself had to input an entire program of 1.5 million lines by sending the data to the computer by tapping out ones and zeroes on a manual telegraph key. Another time I had to do it by touching two wires together. And it was in machine language, too; none of these fancy-schmancy Cobol or Fortran for us! Another time the ARPAnet went down and I had to hold two pieces of telephone wire, one in each hand, and allow my body to be used as the splice -- took ten days before they got that repaired and all the time I was hanging fifteen feet in the air acting as a wire so the critical information could get through from Boston to Stanford.

Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERN’s data handling division requested funding for the research project that would give birth to the web.

The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources they’d require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require “four software engineers and a programmer.” There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses.

Here’s the overview:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

I love the way he picks it up in a couple of notes and is instantly happy. Don't you wish there was a way to do that for everyone?

Back from the meeting tonight, need to process photos this weekend. I'm thinking about how to replace this computer sooner rather than later. Every day with the big Adobe programs it gets so slow at the end of the day after heavy processing on the old one core. I need a strong quad core, and I'd like to build it myself. :) There is supposed to be a bonus on the way, I'm sure it will be puny, but maybe it is a start toward building one. MOM, I might have to clear off the dining room table to do the work, so you'll have to eat in the kitchen for a couple of days.

Maybe I'll change my name back to what it was before: George W. Bush. Then I'll plug socialism, unions, and stuff like that. Or even better, I'll change it to Eyeslee. Or NMario. Or Silly River Sage. Or gnoo. Or Bee-Dubyah-Ell. Or Kandu. Or Tweet.